John & Ann Mahan
Ghosts of the Apostle Islands
A “ghostly” image of Sand Island teenager Fred Hansen, c. 1900, hovers over an aerial view of the Apostle Islands.
As park historian at the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, I recognize that sooner or later, I’ll hear The Question. Whether I’m telling visitors about the park’s superb collection of lighthouses or sharing stories of the islands’ farmers, loggers and fishermen, one thing nags at people’s curiosity more than anything else.
“Are there any places that are ... haunted?”
It’s hard to answer; I believe that many places are haunted in the Apostle Islands – but not in the way that the questioners mean.
In years of research, I’ve yet to uncover a single verifiable story featuring the traditional eerie apparitions or things that go bump in the night. Still, plenty of spots on the islands give me a chill every time I visit. These are places suffused with the spirits of men and women who lived, and sometimes lost, their lives on the Apostles. These spots are easy to find ... if you know what to look for.
Try the abandoned quarry on Basswood Island, for instance. Standing beneath its looming, moss-covered walls always brings to my mind thoughts of Mrs. McCrea, a quarryman’s wife who died during a Christmas Eve blizzard more than a century ago.
Not much is known about this young mother – even her first name is gone from the records – but we know the story of her last day.
On the morning of December 24, 1893, Mrs. McCrea joined two neighbors from the little quarry village to walk across the Lake Superior ice to Bayfield. Their goal: Christmas shopping. With her husband, Dan, at home to mind their two small children, the excursion must have been a welcome break in the island wife’s winter routine.
At 3 that afternoon, their presents bought, the trio started back toward Basswood. The 3-mile trip should have gone quickly enough. Then the weather changed: a blinding blizzard enveloped the party, and they lost all trace of their route. Pummeled by the storm, the three wandered for hours on the frozen lake.
As darkness fell, Dan McCrea grew worried. Leaving the children, he took a lantern and compass and set out. He struggled all the way to Bayfield, hoping to find his wife there safely waiting out the storm. Instead he got the unwelcome news: she’d left across the frozen water hours ago. Dan McCrea turned again toward the island.
On the way home, he found them. Cold and exhausted, the three collapsed barely a mile from safety. His wife, in the worst condition, was too weak to walk. Dan McCrea picked her up and carried her homeward. Before they reached Basswood’s shore, she died in his arms.
A few years after that sad Christmas, the quarry closed for good. But even today, its stone walls bear witness to the work of quarrymen like Dan McCrea. Nearby, keen observers still find faint traces of the cottages where their wives and children lived.
About two miles up the trail from the quarry, another place shelters Basswood Island’s ghosts. Here, the forest opens into a grassy field, edged with crumbling stone walls extending from nowhere to nowhere. At one end of the field grows an ancient apple orchard; at the other, lie the jumbled remains of several wooden buildings.
This deserted farmstead had several residents over the years, among them the eccentric recluse, Joseph McCloud. “Judge McCloud,” people called him because he had been a prominent jurist in Wisconsin’s early statehood days, first a district attorney, then a county judge.
Perhaps his experiences in the legal system soured him on mankind because around 1870, Judge McCloud retired from public life and built a cabin and began to farm on Basswood Island. His passion, however, was not in farming, but in music. He hauled a small pump organ to the island, and when rare visitors stopped, he insisted on playing his latest compositions for their bemused appreciation.
Judge McCloud died in 1900, and the farm was abandoned by 1923. Nonetheless, the site is easy to recognize. Tasty apples still grow on the untended trees. I haven’t yet heard organ music, but I keep listening.
Courtesy Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
Ghosts of the Apostle Islands
Ghost hunters today can find the ruins of a cottage (c. 1977) on Sand Island made from the hull of the fire-damaged Herring King.
My favorite place to hunt ghosts is Sand Island, at the western end of the archipelago. Sand is one of only two Apostle Islands – the other is Madeline – that were home to a fully developed community. Settled first in the 1870s, the island had a population of nearly 100 at the time of the First World War. There were two stores, and even a post office. Then the community faded as its young people left for the economic opportunity and modern conveniences of the mainland. The last year-round family moved away in the autumn of 1944. Since then, the forest has reclaimed the farmers’ fields, the fishing docks have rotted away. Madeline Island, by contrast, continues as a lively year-round community.
Clues abound for diligent ghost hunters on Sand Island. Most visitors arrive at the National Park Service’s East Bay dock, and the majority stroll unknowingly right past a reminder of one of the island’s strangest stories. Mere yards from the dock, tucked in the woods, is a tumbled-down shack made from the hull of a boat.
On Thanksgiving Day 1917, Herring King was making its last run of the season. The gas-powered tug was a jack-of-all-trades. It mainly collected fish from island camps, but now and then it carried lumber or other goods. Islanders relied on it to bring groceries and mail from the mainland.
On this Thanksgiving Day afternoon at about 2:30, the tug’s two-man crew had just cast off from Louis Moe’s dock near East Bay when a fish keg fell against a fuel line. Gasoline sprayed onto the hot engine. In seconds the boat burst aflame.
Crewman Clarence Russell jumped into the lifeboat and pushed off. In his haste, he forgot the oars, but the southwest wind quickly carried him away from the burning tug. Stranded, Captain John Gordon retreated to the bow, as far as he could get from the flames. By chance, the Duluth-based steamer Goldish was passing close enough to help. Her captain, S.L. Goldish, was among the most skilled mariners on Lake Superior, and he was already renowned for daring rescues. Captain Goldish maneuvered close to Herring King, close enough for a crewman to throw Gordon a life ring. Leaping into the icy water, Gordon swam a few strokes toward safety, then sank from sight. He was never seen again.
That evening, fishermen towed the charred hulk of Herring King to shore. One practical island family put the remains to use. Turning the hull upside down, they built walls beneath it and made the wreck into a cabin. The structure stood for many years, long after its owners departed the island. Today, though the walls have collapsed, a sharp-eyed ghost hunter will recognize a boat’s hull in the roofline.
Not every ghost story is sad; Sand Island has its share of laughter and happy memories. To hear faint echoes of children’s voices from long ago, make your way a little south of the Herring King cottage. Trek a few yards west into the woods to a low, masonry foundation – the remains of the Sand Island school.
From 1910 until the late 1920s, the children of the island’s farmers and fishermen learned their ABCs in this one-room schoolhouse. When county authorities decided it was no longer economical to support a teacher on the island, the school closed and the settlement’s children were forced to board with families in Bayfield during the school year. The frugal islanders dismantled the building and salvaged the lumber, leaving the foundation that you’ll still see today – if you take the time to look.
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Courtesy Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
Ghosts of the Apostle Islands
Lullabye Island Logging Camp, then ...
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Courtesy Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
Ghosts of the Apostle Islands
... and now.
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Ghosts of the Apostle Islands
A Lullabye Logging Camp truck on Outer Island.
While Sand and Basswood islands have some of the most readily accessible ghost-hunting spots, history haunts places on virtually every Apostle Island. A good ghost hunter will discover old boats and net reels moldering along many shores, abandoned when the commercial fishery collapsed with the onslaught of the lamprey. Farther into the woods, sleuths will encounter traces of logging camps: an old stove here, an anvil and some horseshoes there, and even, on Oak Island, a massive safe that once held a winter’s worth of wages.
The best place to seek out lumbermen’s ghosts has to be Outer Island. Like most of the Apostles, Outer was logged several times. As early as 1884, ax-wielding woodsmen harvested the island’s pine. Loggers returned for hardwoods in the 1920s, building a narrow-gauge railroad that ran from the southern tip to the center of the island. The final push came in the 1950s, when a crew dubbed the “Flying Lumberjacks” shuttled back and forth to the mainland in light planes, using chain saws and bulldozers to gather hemlock.
Today, Outer Island’s main hiking trail follows the path of the old railroad; at one spot, the remains of a coal car can be seen in the forest. Near the island’s northern tip, cabins that housed the Flying Lumberjacks molder in the woods. Scattered among them are the wrecks of trucks and heavy equipment. The hangar that sheltered their planes is fading into dust near the sand spit at the south end.
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Courtesy Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
Ghosts of the Apostle Islands
Long Island residents in front of the Old La Pointe Lighthouse (c.1897).
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Ghosts of the Apostle Islands
... contrasted with its overgrown ghost today.
Some ghosts found in the Apostles linger at the edges of the land and water. Their stories can make one shiver even in a bright summer sun.
The narrow sandbar known as Long Island hides a crumbled lighthouse among its scrubby pines. Here, on a bitter cold morning in 1886, the shocked keeper of the Old La Pointe lighthouse looked out from his tower to see the wreckage of a schooner lying in the surf. Seeing men clinging to the masts, the keeper hastened to the beach to help. When he got there, he realized to his horror that the men were frozen beyond his help.
“I found three bodies,” he wrote in his log, “one in the main and two in the mizzen rigging.”
Today, sport divers often visit the sunken remains of the schooner Lucerne, but few people seek out the brick walls that mark the ruins of the old lighthouse barely a half-mile away. For those of us on the hunt for Apostle Island ghosts, those falling walls – and a smidgen of imagination – make for a most haunting island experience.
Bob Mackreth, Apostle Islands park historian, has worked for the National Park Service since 1977.